Bills, a boring job and political apathy – welcome to adulthood

Being an adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Change can be difficult, but for the millennial generation, the shift from student to working stiff is especially trying.

As they grapple with student loan debt, lackluster employment opportunities, and achieving financial independence, millennials aren’t satisfied with their current jobs and increasingly uncertain about their personal finances and political decisions, yet remain hopeful for the future, according to a poll conducted by Clark University.

The online poll surveyed 1,000 so-called emerging adults — defined as ages 21 to 29 — of varying educational, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds on their views of education, transitioning to work life and current work life.

Despite the dissatisfaction during the education to work transition period, millennials are still optimistic. About 60% of those surveyed are planning on switching career fields at least once in their working lives, while 65% say their current job is not in the field they hope to be in 10 years from now, the poll found, making this generation of emerging adults less complacent about their working situation than those in the past.

Jeff Arnett, director of the poll, attributes this insecurity to the prolonged transition period between education and working adulthood.

He says that with the conversion to a knowledge-based economy from a manufacturing-based economy that has occurred over the last 50 years, education and life experience have become increasingly valuable. When millennials graduate high school and college, “they’re not ready yet, they don’t know anything that other people don’t already know.”

While 80% of respondents say they think higher education is more important than ever, 40% say their degree has not provided them with the work opportunities they anticipated.

Arnett says this discrepancy stems from the millennial generation’s desire to find jobs they deem meaningful and fit their identity. During this transition period, he says, they are either still in school, working part time or working entry-level jobs, figuring out what exactly their identity is and the career that fits them the best.

He says this transition period is the longest it has been in recorded history because the nature of how people view work has changed.

“It all begins with the changes in economics,” Arnett says, referring to the shift to the knowledge economy. “People think about work differently. They aren’t just looking for a way to make a living, they’re idealistic about the kind of work they hope to find.”

In addition to work opportunities, millennials are feeling less prepared about handling their own money. About 66% say they feel uncertain about navigating personal finances, though 73% say they feel prepared to handle the responsibilities of daily life.

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Arnett says the expectations that arise from growing up in an affluent era, which can cause emerging adults to worry when they can’t afford certain lifestyle amenities they have come to expect.

“It’s tough to be in your 20s and either in education or working part time, or in the early years of the work force when you’re inevitably the bottom person in the hierarchy and not getting paid very much,” Arnett says.

He says these expectations of a higher standard of living have existed since he began studying the emerging adult age group in the 1990s at an earlier stage in the knowledge economy, and these attitudes have not changed much since.

“This generation of emerging adults is amazingly affluent compared to others,” Arnett says. “They have expectations for consumption that people didn’t have 50 years ago or 100 years ago.”

Another defining characteristic of the latest generation of emerging adults is their lack of trust in the political system. About 68% say they don’t feel prepared to make decisions about political and social issues, and 59% say they are not confident in voting in elections.

Arnett says that though millennials are well-informed about political and social issues via social media and popular commentators like former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, they are cynical about the ability of effective change to come from politics.

“They’re more likely than other generations to be involved in groups working toward causes they care about,” Arnett says. “But they don’t have a lot of faith in the conventional political process.”

Though the growing pains of the emerging adult transition period seem difficult now, Arnett says, “It gets a lot tougher in their 30s.”

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